To Read Others' Emotions, It Helps to be Poor

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Money can't buy you happiness — or social skills, apparently. A
new study finds those who are poor are better at empathy than the
wealthy.

In multiple experiments, people of high socioeconomic status (or
people who perceived themselves to be well-off) were worse at
judging other people's emotions than those of low socioeconomic
status, both when looking at photographs and interacting with
real people. The reason may be that people with low income or low
education have to be more responsive to others to get by, said
study author Michael Kraus, a postdoctoral researcher in
psychology at the University of California, San Francisco.

"You can see how
being empathic provides a better ability to respond to social
threats," Kraus told LiveScience. "It also gives you an
opportunity to respond to social opportunities."

The empathy gap

Kraus' earlier research has found that wealthier people are
ruder
than poorer people in conversations with strangers. They've
also found that the poor are more
generous with their wealth than the rich. Their greater
empathy could be the root of that charity, Kraus said.

"They're vigilant of other people's need, and they respond when
they see it," he said.

The researchers conducted three experiments to tease out the
empathy gap between rich and poor. In the first, they focused on
the educational aspect of socioeconomic status (SES). The
researchers recruited 200 university employees, ranging from
office support personnel to educators to managers. They then
collected data on the volunteers' educational attainment and
asked them to identify facial expressions in a series of
photographs.

This was one test that schooling couldn't help you pass: Those
who completed only a high-school education scored an average of 7
percent higher than those with a college education. (The raw
scores were converted to a scale in which the average participant
in the study scored 100.89. When the numbers were broken down by
education, those participants who completed only a high-school
education scored an average of 106, compared with an average of
99 for college-educated participants.)

Next, the researchers had 106 students interact with one another
in fake job interviews. They were asked to rate their own
emotions and the emotions of their partners during the interview.
Those who reported being higher on the socioeconomic ladder
scored worse at accurately
guessing their partners' emotions.

"It was across gender, across ethnic backgrounds," Kraus said.
"You really see lower-class individuals showing this greater
empathic accuracy in the study."

Which comes first?

But what if people who are financially well-off get that way
because they're more self-focused? What if wealth doesn't affect
empathy, but empathy affects wealth? To find out, the researchers
recruited 81 different students. This time, they asked some of
the students to visualize an extraordinarily wealthy individual —
someone like Bill Gates, Kraus said.

Next, the students were told to place themselves on the
socioeconomic ladder, imagining their wealthy individual at the
top. Thinking of the Gates-like figure triggered the students to
place themselves lower on the ladder than they otherwise
would have. Other students were told to imagine someone
completely destitute; those students placed themselves relatively
higher on the ladder.

Finally, the 81 students looked at 36 close-up photographs of
eyes and judged the emotions portrayed in the pictures. Sure
enough, those manipulated into seeing themselves as lower-class
scored 6 percent better than those manipulated into perceiving
themselves as well-off.

That was a critical finding, Kraus said.

"If you manipulate, then you can talk about class leading to
empathy," he said.

Kraus and his colleagues reported the results online Oct. 25 in
the journal Psychological Science.

Building empathy

"This is fascinating," Vladas Griskevicius, a University of
Minnesota psychologist who was not involved in the study, told
Livescience.

"Most researchers would expect that people from higher-SES
backgrounds would be better at reading other people,"
Griskevicius said. "But this research finds that people from
lower-SES backgrounds are more attuned to what others are
thinking and feeling."

Kraus and his colleagues are now interested in finding ways to
influence people's empathy levels.

"Being empathic is one of the first steps to helping other
people," Kraus said. "One of the first things we're really
interested in is what can make wealthy people — affluent people
the people with the largest capacity to give — what can make them
empathic?"